The special handling units are seen by the penitentiary authorities as
a successful response to the problem of the dangerous prisoner, so much
so that recent announcements by the solicitor-general point to more such
units being established. In light of my description of the regimes of
the SHUs, it will come as no surprise to discover that, in my judgment,
an extension of those regimes will further compound the illegitimacy of
Canada's ultimate carceral power. I have described how the physical space
and program requirements set out in the Vantour-McReynolds Report, which
is the theoretical model for the SHUs, have simply not been met. Consequently,
the whole idea of the phased return to the general population, while described
by the Penitentiary Service as the chief difference between these units
and regular segregation, is a correctional fiction.

It would be a significant step forward if all segregation units in maximum-security
institutions were made to conform to the requirements of the Vantour-McReynolds
Report in their physical and program resources. However, the behaviour-modification
assumptions concerning the way SHUs or any other segregation unit should
be operated must be abandoned.

It is ironic that at the very time the SHUs were established (on an overtly
behaviouralistic model), the federal government's Task Force on the Creation
of an Integrated Canadian Corrections Service recommended that 'rehabilitation
...must cease to be a purpose of the prison sentence reasoning behind
this was stated as follows:

Since the early 1960s, one of the most widely held
beliefs in corrections management has been, and still is to a great extent,
that the best way to protect society is to 'rehabilitate' the offender
...It makes the assumption that correctional practitioners are able to
change or modify the personality which further assumes that criminal behaviour
is somehow an expression of some underlying personality disturbance which
requires extensive therapy and treatment before the criminal behaviour
ceases. As a correctional goal, these claims have been challenged as being
unrealistic, unsubstantiated and unattainable. The concept of rehabilitation
has raised unrealistic expectations of altering criminal behaviour ...The
approach gives correctional practitioners a strong inducement to employ
coercion in the guise of humane treatment, and to enforce participation
in treatment programs as a requisite to release ...Resulting distrust
among offenders of the institutional treatment program further undermines
the possibility of effecting fundamental behavioural change.57

The assumption that as a result of such subtle manipulations of the correctional
environment as the provision or withholding of a television set, or permitting
association every night in a small common room as opposed to every other
night, the most dangerous prisoners will become non-dangerous, is as 'unrealistic,
unsubstantiated and unattainable' as any that have been made about the
rehabilitative ideal.

Nor is the behaviouralist underpinning of the SHU any more attainable
when conceived not in terms of rehabilitation but rather in terms 6f inducing
a conditioned response of submission to and compliance with authority.
Few prisoners who find themselves in segregation (and particularly not
men like Jack McCann, Andy Bruce, and Edgar
Roussel) will, without resistance, abandon the struggle for individuality,
for the assertion of their distinctive personalities, and concede that
they are merely puppets in the latest act in the repertoire of the 'grand
theatre' of carceral authority.

It is important to understand the implications of my position that the
behavioural-modification basis for segregation units must be abandoned
as illegitimate. As I have made clear, this position does not in any way
entail the rejection of the various programs which the Vantour-McReynolds
Report recommended as part of the segregation regime. It does, however,
entail rejection of the Vantour-McReynolds rationale for making these
programs available. As I have pointed out, that rationale was to provide
opportunities for the prisoners to demonstrate 'meaningful behavioural
change' and for authorities to assess the behavioural interaction of prisoners
in order to determine the rate of their progression through the phases
and their ultimate release. In my view, the principal justification for
permitting segregated prisoners the rights and privileges of normal visitation,
correspondence, library, work, and educational programs is that they are
essential components of a prison regime which, consistent with carrying
out the sentence of the court, should reduce the inherently debilitating
effects of imprisonment by adopting the least restrictive means of confinement.
The segregation regime is not 'beyond the ken' of this correctional mandate.
I hope I have demonstrated that present carceral practices relating to
segregation are not the least restrictive means we have available to us
and that these practices, far from reducing, intensify the most debilitating
features of imprisonment.

I have already described how the implementation of the special handling
unit concept in 1977 was, together with the introduction of life sentences
for murder with minimum terms of up to twenty-five years, part of the
political trade-off for the abolition of the death penalty. The federal
government has not pursued its original intention of using the units for
the incarceration of all these sentenced to twenty-five years for first-degree
murder; instead attention has been focused on the dangerous prisoner who
poses a serious threat of violence within prison walls. There remains,
however, a close relationship between the SHUs and the draconian sentences
with which they were linked politically. Professor Normandeau of the School
of Criminology at the University of Montreal commented in 1976 that the
legislation introducing the mandatory twenty-five year sentences 'is tantamount
...to inventing a new death penalty in disguise which, this time, would
threaten the penitentiary personnel as much as the murderers ...Thus we
shall probably see a series of blackmailings, riots, hunger strikes, sabotages,
hostage-takings, grievous assaults, murders and escapes.'58

Professor Normandeau's prediction is already coming to pass. The day
before my first visit to the CDC in May 1980 an escape attempt and a hostage-taking
occurred in Laval Institution. One prisoner was shot. Eight of the nine
prisoners involved were serving twenty-five-year minimum sentences. It
should not be surprising that prisoners who are subjected to these sentences
are figuring disproportionately in acts of institutional violence. The
penitentiary was never conceived as a place for imprisonment for twenty-five
years. Prior to 1850, sentences in excess of five years were rare. Lord
John Russell expressed the view in 1837 that ten years in prison would
be a 'punishment worse than death.'59 How
do Canadian prisoners in 1983 view twenty-five years in prison? Edgar
Roussel, who is serving such a sentence, told the solicitor-general in
an open letter written from the CDC, 'they have tried to hide the smell
of death, though unsuccessfully, by imposing mandatory sentences instead
of capital punishment. The rope is longer and the feeling of suffocation
isn't quite as apparent, but the results are the same, death!60

Another prisoner I interviewed in the SHU at Millhaven described how
he saw his life in the face of a twenty-five year sentence in these chilling
terms: 'It is really quite simple. I will escape or I will die trying.'
For men whose experience has been characterized by violence to come to
see life as time without hope save that of escape is fraught with the
prospect of further violence. Under the present policies the institutional
response to such violence will be a two-year stint in SHU. But this prospect
must fail as a deterrent in the face of a twenty-five year sentence. The
prison authorities will then be pressured to escalate the length and rigours
of the regime. This will inexorably push the SHU regime backward to (and
perhaps beyond) the regime condemned in McCann,
to the point highlighted by Dr Korn where the effects of the repressive
measures taken against the prisoners are such that they can never be let
out of their cages.61 Unless the most serious
reconsideration is given to the legitimacy of the two political pillars
of abolition, the SHU and the twenty-five-year minimum sentences, I fear
the Canadian pententiary system is indeed heading backward toward Jack
McCann's 'gates of hell.' The doubling
of the length of a prisoner's stay in SHU, introduced in 1980 as part
of the 'dangerous inmate policy,' is an ominous road sign in this regression.
Others have urged the abandonment of the twenty-five-year minimum sentences;62
I urge the closing of the SHUs.